


The Lighting of a Candle and the Dawning of an Age

by MamzelleCombeferre



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, Gender Swap fic, just a thing I wrote for a project some friends and I were working on a while back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-12 00:08:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MamzelleCombeferre/pseuds/MamzelleCombeferre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gender Swap fic in which Marius is now called Marie. Gillenormand takes in a granddaughter instead of a grandson basically. Gender swapped rewrite of 3.3.3 in the brick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lighting of a Candle and the Dawning of an Age

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for a gender swapped collaborative fic where we turned Marius into a female (Marie), and Cosette into a male (Corbett) so as to highlight the similarities between the upbringing of Cosette and Marius. The project has since been abandoned, but I was rather fond of this bit that I wrote for it, and thought I would share it on here. If it sounds familiar to this portion of the brick, it's supposed to. Hope you enjoy!

Marie- 1817-1827

In the year 1817, M. Gillenormand, accompanied by his oldest daughter, began attending the salon of Madame la baronne de T----- in his neightborhood, rue Féron. Her husband, the baron de T-----, had been a successful ambassador of France in Berlin under Louis XVI, but an unfortunate turn of events left him dead. Survived only by his wife and ten volumes of his bizarre memoirs on mesmer which were kept unpublished as an act to preserve the dignity of the family name, Mme. La baronne held a twice weekly salon and supported herself on the good taste of the friends who gathered around her and a small, but lingering, income. The salon was a royalist one of that brand called Ultra, meaning to never be satisfied with any state of events, desired or not. These friends with good tastes were from several backgrounds, all wealthy, but consisted of elderly ladies and gentlemen, soldiers, and even a few priests, and it was in this environment that Marie, now a young girl of eight, was raised. 

In this environment the child who had flourished all but two years before had begun to wilt. Marie, who had all of her mother’s natural wit and vibrancy, took on the soberness of her grandfather and aunt, becoming what no child should be, grim. Mlle. Gillenormand toted Marie along on these visits to Mme. La baronne’s gatherings as one totes along a small pet. She was not meant to speak or be spoken to, but to exist as someone to look at and be cooed over. Marie, in all her young innocence, had been excited about these visits at first. She was mesmerized by the colors of the women’s dresses, the way they rustled when they walked and laughed. It was the only time she got to see her grandfather laugh, which meant he wasn’t scolding her. These people shaped her view of the world. Occasionally her father’s name came up in these conversations, but always with a sneer, and so the man she once thought of as kind and paternal now only appeared in her mind as an object of shame. She blushed and grew even quiet whenever asked about him, which was blessedly not often.

Despite this, the girl never lost her laughter, and so even when the years passed, and her childhood innocence fell away, she was never completely overwhelmed by anger or depression. In all the ways that matter she was no different from any other child raised by grandparents who are too old to keep up with a child so young. When not going on outings with her nursemaid-turned-nanny, she was being taught by her aunt basic academics and the skills that every woman should know. These lessons only served to instill within her a great love of books and a great dislike for sewing, to her aunt’s dismay and her grandfather’s very secret pleasure.

“You will not catch a husband by burying yourself in books, Marie. A man does not appreciate a woman being smarter than he, trust me. I would know.” Aunt Gillenormand would say, occasionally looking over the top of her knitting to make sure Marie was concentrating on her cross-stitching. 

A lonely child, and one rarely exposed to the larger world outside of the Gillenormand’s social sphere, it was not surprising that her insatiable natural curiosity find itself instead quenched by books. Her grandfather had a limited library, but she was not picky, and so devoured any and all materials she could find, novels, histories, religious texts, and philosophies, though she had the greatest penchant for poetry. Eventually the places she went and the characters she met became her only friends and dreams. Marie learned quickly that if she completed her stitching early in the day, then she would be allowed to read aloud in the evenings while her aunt knit (always scarves. Marie doubted she knew how to make anything else) and her grandfather enjoyed the fire, occasionally correcting her pronunciations. For a time they were comfortable.

The years passed in this way, and over time Marie grew from a childishly cute girl of seven to a beautiful young woman of nearly 17. M. Gillenormand was touched by her looks, often so that he had to look away as tears formed. She reminded him of his youngest daughter, showing all traces of her and few of Georges. If one looked close enough, you could see Marie’s father in the set of her mouth, the comely shape of her ears, and the slope of her nose, but it was never obvious at first glance, and was easily looked over.  
By now Georges was forgotten by his child. Marie knew enough to know she had a father, but no more beyond that. Twice a year she wrote to him, on the first of January and on Saint George’s feast day. These letters were cold and impersonal, dictated by her aunt who was also cold and impersonal. M. Gillenormand always pocketed the replies. Thus, Georges Pontmercy became like a spirit to her, never malevolent, but faintly embarrassing and always present, though only to be referred to in the most derogatory of terms. Marie held no great love for either Gillenormand, but she held even greater apathy towards her father, the man she had come to believe had never loved her. No one ever said anything contrary, and so her opinions never changed, and so she turned 17, a year where youth begins to get the barest tastings of adulthood, and the year everything changes, for the better or worse, yet to be seen.


End file.
